A Burlington Designer Scored 3.2/10 — Here's Exactly What We Found

Carson Teal is a freelance designer in Burlington with a clean portfolio site, good word of mouth, and a near-zero AI visibility score — here's what the audit revealed.

This is what a real Sourcepull Signal Check looks like from the inside.

The pre-check

Before running AI queries, we check the technical fundamentals. Carson's site passed on HTTP status, SSL, and sitemap. It failed on: no llms.txt file, no LocalBusiness or Service schema, and no structured entity profile on LinkedIn or any design directory.

Six checks. Three soft failures. Nothing catastrophic, but nothing that helps an AI model confidently cite the business either.

What the AI platforms said

We ran 40 queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Queries included "best freelance designer in Burlington", "Carson Teal design", "freelance graphic designer Burlington Ontario", and category queries like "UI designer near Burlington."

ChatGPT mentioned Carson in 2 of 10 queries but cited in 0 — it gave generic answers rather than naming specific businesses. Perplexity cited Carson in 2 of 10 queries, both times pulling from a portfolio showcase site that had listed the business, not from Carson's own domain. Claude offered no Burlington-specific mentions at all. Gemini mentioned Carson once from a local news award mention, cited in 0.

Overall score: 3.2 / 10.

What we recommended

Add llms.txt to the domain root (15 minutes). Implement Service and LocalBusiness schema (1 hour). Create a Behance and Dribbble profile that explicitly lists "Burlington, Ontario" (30 minutes). Get listed in two local design directories. Write one service page specifically targeting "freelance designer Burlington" with schema.

The re-audit

We re-ran the audit 3 weeks after fixes were implemented. Score: 6.1/10. Perplexity citations went from 2 to 7 out of 10 queries. ChatGPT began citing Carson in 4 of 10 queries. Total implementation time was under 3 hours.

The original audit cost $79. The improvement was visible in under a month.